Sitting comfortably in her chair, Joanna could be in touch with any part of the Masterson corporation, anywhere in the world or beyond.

But her mind was on her sons. Greg was getting along well enough, running the corporation’s Pacific division out in the island nation of Kiribati. It wasn’t exile so much as one more test to see if he really could function, really could build a halfway normal life for himself. So far, Greg was doing fine. But she always found herself using that term so far wherever Greg was concerned.

It was her younger son, Douglas, who worried her. Joanna realized that Doug was at the age where he sought a quest, a way of proving his manhood. Naturally enough, he looked to the Moon.

An adventurous eighteen-year-old never thinks that pain or injury or death can reach him. When she found that he was planning to jetbike all the way to Seattle she absolutely forbade it.

“Come on, Mom,” Doug replied with his father’s winning smile. “I’ll be all right. What can happen to me?”

During his first visit to Vancouver she learned that he had taken part in a power surfing jaunt to Victoria. “What could have happened to me?” he asked when she phoned, appalled at the risks he blithely took on.

She hoped that attending the university, under Cardenas’s tutelage, would calm Doug down. Lately he had taken to flying rocket-boosted soarplanes. “Riding the jet stream!” he chirped happily, all eagerness and enthusiasm. “What a blast!”

And now he was at Moonbase, celebrating his eighteenth birthday a quarter-million miles from home. From her.

How like his father Doug was, she thought. The same burning drive, the same restless urge to break new ground, to push the edges of the envelope. He had his father’s radiant smile and quick wit. His skin was lighter than Paul’s had been: a smooth olive complexion, with blue eyes that sparkled youthfully.

Paul must have been just like that at eighteen, Joanna realized; impatient to prove himself. Willing to take on risks because he doesn’t think for an instant that he could be harmed. The impervious confidence of youth.

And now he’s on the Moon, just as Paul was. Why? she asked herself. What is it about that harsh unforgiving country that draws men like that?

Joanna had never told Doug all the details of his father’s death. Nor anyone else. As she pictured her younger son’s eagerly beaming face, she was wondered again if she had been right to keep the truth from him.

ALPHONSUS

The outer airlock hatch swung open at last and Doug stepped out onto another world.

He forgot about the pounding of his heart, forgot about Foster Brennart standing beside him, forgot about everything except the eerie grandeur that now stretched before his hungry eyes.

He forgot about making bootprints in the lunar dust. If Brennart said anything, he didn’t hear it. If he himself spoke or made any sound at all he was unaware of it. His whole being filled with the vision of the lunar landscape: stark, somber, silent. The ground before him was flat, pockmarked with little craters, glaring brightly in the unfiltered light of the Sun. The mountains that marched off to the sudden horizon on either side of him looked somehow soft, rounded, old and tired. Easy to climb, Doug thought. Their folds and slopes made shadows that were impenetrably dark, utter blackness side-by-side with the bright glitter of their sunlit flanks.

The horizon was sharp as a knife edge, cutting off the world where it met the infinity of space. Gray and black, Doug saw. The Moon was a hundred shades of gray, from gleaming bright almost-white to the somber charcoal of the pitted ground beneath his booted feet And black, shadows darker than the deepest pits of Earth, and the even blacker expanse of endless space. An uncompromising world, Doug thought: brilliantly bright in sunlight or unconditionally dark in shadow, sharp and clear as the choice between good and evil.

The only touches of color Doug could see were the dayglo-painted tractors working silently at their tasks: bulldozers scraping up the regolith, backhoes piling the dirt into waiting trucks, which carried it to a small man-made hill. That’s where the nanomachines extract oxygen and hydrogen from the regolith, Doug told himself. On Earth they’d be roaring and grunting, their gears would be grinding away. Here on the Moon they do their jobs in perfect silence.

It’s quiet here, he thought. Peaceful. A man can hear himself think.

He turned and looked out toward the horizon once again, framed by the curving ringwall mountains and dimpled almost exactly in its middle by the tips of the crater’s central peaks, barely visible above the slash that separated sunlit ground from the endless void of space. Doug strained his eyes, but couldn’t see any stars at all.

“I thought there’d be stars even in the daytime,” he said.

“Slide up your outer visor,” Brennart told him, “but be careful not to look at the Sun.”

Doug did it, yet the sky remained dark and empty.

“Cup your hands around your eyes. Cut off the ground glare.”

Doug pressed his cupped hands to his visor, but nothing changed.

“Give it a few seconds.”

And there they were! Stars appeared out of the darkness, not merely the pinpoints of light that Doug was accustomed to, but swarms of stars, oceans of stars, stars strewn so thickly across the heavens that the darkness was banished. Doug tottered as he stared out at the universe, felt himself getting dizzy.

“When I behold your heavens, O Lord,” he whispered, “the work of your fingers…”

“I know that one,” Brennart said. “Some psalm from the Bible, isn’t it”

“Yes,” Doug said.

“You’re Paul Stavenger’s son, aren’t you?”

“You knew my father?”

“Knew him?” Brennart laughed, a high-pitched giggle. “Like the man says, we were practically hatched from the same egg. The times we had up here! And back Earthside!”

“What was he like?” Doug asked.

“You look a lot like him,” saidBrennart. “Come on, I want to show you something.” And he took off in long, loping, low-gravity strides across the crater floor.

As Doug followed him, the two of them galloping along like a pair of tailless kangaroos, Brennart began happily relating tales of the days when he and Paul Stavenger and a handful of others were digging the first temporary shelters of Moonbase.

“Would you believe old Billy-boy was one of us, then? A real hell-raiser, too.”

“The safety chief?” Doug guessed.

“Yep. He changed an awful lot once they put him behind a desk. You’re never going to see me vegetate like that!”

They were skirting the edge of the solar energy farms now, where the ground gleamed with acre after acre of glassy solar cells. Along the far edge of the glittering field Doug could see a dark oily film; it looked alien, out of place, almost hostile. Nanomachines, he realized, working ceaselessly to convert lunar regolith into more solar cells.

“Up there…’ Brennart was puffing; Doug could hear his labored breathing in his earphones.

Up ahead was a machine of some sort: a big, boxy, heavy metal contraption resting on what looked like caterpillar treads. It had once been painted white, Doug saw, but now it was streaked with smears of dusty dead gray.

“What is it?”

Brennart slowed to a walk as they approached the abandoned machine. He seemed to twist inside his suit, adjusting the bulky life-support pack on his back. “Damned LSPs never stay in place like they should,” he muttered.

“What is this thing?” Doug asked again. Now that they were close enough to touch it, he saw that the machine was really massive, taller than even Brennart himself.

“This poor dumb beast,” said Brennart, “is what we used in the old days to make the solar farms, before we had nanomachines to do the work.”